Today, we are in the beginning of the new era of robotics. A significant paradigm shift – bringing robots and humans spatially together – is currently reshaping both research and real-world applications. Different from conventional robots those can precisely repeat a predetermined high precision position control tasks in a closed environment; new generation robots should be capable of physically interacting with unstructured open environments – possibly human beings – to perform advanced robotic applications such as human-robot collaboration, rehabilitation, humanoid and so on. Physical Robot-Environment Interaction“p-REI” becomes one of the most fundamental requirements in the new era of robotics. Motivated by this paradigm shift, we would like to organize a special session on p-REI to gather researchers who focus on this problem and provide a site for discussion. In particular, the Special Session will focus on, but is not limited to, the following topics of interest.